The Slave Narrative in African-American Literature: A Study of Solomon Northup, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs

Abstract

DOI: 10.7176/JLLL/65-03

Publication date: February 29^th 2020

Between 1770 when Ukawsaw Gronniosaw's work announced the birth of the African-American literary tradition and 1860, the most dominant form of narrative focused on the experience of slavery as encountered by blacks in the United States. Although identifiable as a unique genre of its own, the typical slave narrative is essentially a form of autobiography. Generally speaking, an autobiography is a self portrait narrative construed and constructed by the subject himself.

Precisely, between 1820 and 1860, there were a wide range of publications by Afro-Americans on America's peculiar institution. These publications exposed in details their complex ethnical and psychological orientation toward slavery, demanding in very strict terms, the abolition of the Southern tyranny. It was these collective utterances that made up what the Afro-American writer, Arma Bontemps, calls an ""American genre" of literary narrative, otherwise known as "Slave narrative" (See Ogude 30 -31).

Written by ex-slaves, the narratives reveal a common pattern of representation, revealing the author's

circumstances and experiences under servitude, his heroic journey from slavery to freedom as well as his subsequent identification with the abolitionist cause, For instance, in the preface to her Narrative, Linda Brent aimed at arousing the members of the public, particularly, the women to rise up against the institution of slavery in the South in the spirit of abolitionist cause. Thus she says:

I have not written my experience in order to attract attention to myself; on the contrary, it would have been more pleasant to me to have been silent about my own history. Neither do I come to excite sympathy for my own sufferings. But I do earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered, and most of them far worse. I want to add my testimony to that of able pens to convince the people of the free states what slavery really is. Only by experience can anyone realize how deep and dark and foul is that pit of abomination (6).

For our purpose, our focus in the present essay is to undertake a comparative study of three Afro-American slave narratives namely Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup, An American Slave by Frederick Douglass and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs. In doing these specific and crucial aspects of the narratives such as: region of servitude, life in the plantation, Master-slave relationship, religion and slavery, and education and slave emancipation will be highlighted and discussed. This is finally capped with a conclusion. An elaborate specification and description of the region of servitude involved is a fundamental aspect of the three slave narratives considered here. The three narratives focus on those Southern states of the United State of America characteristically branded slave states. In the slave states, agricultural economy prevailed. There were large-scale cotton, corn, sugar cane and tobacco plantations, where slaves were deployed to work under conditions of servitude.